The data must flow

Main menu

Post navigation

Using Org mode for course development and presentations

For the last two semesters I’ve been teaching part of LSM2241, Introductory Bioinformatics at NUS. This is the first serious exposure to Bioinformatics for students in the Life Sciences at NUS, so it’s a great opportunity to help ~160 students appreciate the increasingly central role bioinformatics has in the practice of biology.

This coming term I’m giving all the lectures. I don’t consider myself a great lecturer – on the contrary, I consider this an opportunity to practice – but I think second year undergraduates don’t benefit much from team-taught lecture courses, so one lecturer of my quality is better than four lecturers of varying quality.

The workhorse of my course planning and preparation is Emacs Org mode. I use it for planning my own work, for making presentations and handouts (via Beamer and LaTeX export), for preparing exams, and for tracking my own development as a teacher.

Last term I found some huge benefits of Beamer over PowerPoint or Keynote. For example, when we were discussing dynamic programming algorithms for sequence alignment, it was pretty straightforward to write an alignment program that emitted TikZ diagrams animating the steps of filling in an alignment matrix. I ended up using this twice in the lecture: first as a worked example in the slide copies the students received, and second during the lecture itself, so we could walk through the whole classroom and perform an alignment via student participation.

The animation would have been unthinkable in PowerPoint, since it added the equivalent of ~80 slides to the deck. With Beamer I could (i) make the animation, (ii) distribute a slide deck with the filled matrix from the animation, thus satisfying the demands of today’s students to have slides ahead of time, while still minimizing excessive printing, and (iii) generate a second animation from an unseen alignment problem for the class to work through together during the lecture. Doing it this year will be as simple as changing the input to the program and regenerating the slides.

This is all done via Org-babel, the miraculous multi-lingual literate programming environment supported by Org mode.

But before getting into that level of detail, I’ll mention one tweak I use in Org-beamer export. When exporting to LaTeX or HTML, Org mode knows to do the right thing for figures and tables. So, for example,

#+CAPTION: This is a caption
[[file:/media/foo.png]]

will create a figure with a caption when exported to any supported format, including LaTeX and HTML.

However, the LaTeX export uses \caption{}, which automatically adds a Figure 1 label to the caption of the first figure in the document. Likewise for tables. In normal LaTeX documents, that’s the right thing to do, but for Beamer numbered figures and tables aren’t needed.

But I still want captions! To fix this, I make sure to include the caption package in the header with

#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage[justification=centering]{caption}

Then I add a hook to convert all my \caption to \caption* as the last step in my Org Beamer exporter.